Long-Term National Housing Strategy

Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise (Con)]

My Lords, this debate is testament to a rare cross-party consensus. There is broad agreement that our housing market is socially divisive and economically debilitating. I would argue that it is the single biggest impediment to economic growth in the UK. Yet numerous strategies, initiatives and attempts at reform have consistently failed to deliver meaningful change.

The reason for that failure, I believe, is simple. Every reform has begun with the implicit belief that development needs to be planned by government dictating where we live, what type of houses we live in, and where we work and shop. Government, national or local, simply does not have the requisite knowledge, incentives or resources to do that; no single guiding mind ever could. That planned economies do not work seems to be a lesson the world never tires of learning. We plod through the standard Soviet list of excuses for failure: blame the plan, then blame the planners, then blame everybody else that you can. But the problem here is not the planners, the nimbys or even the politicians. They are symptoms of a deeper problem: planned economies do not deliver.

Some assume that the only alternative to top-down planning is free-for-all, conjuring up images of a nation covered in concrete, but there is a middle way: the same system that regulates virtually every other successful economic activity in the western world, from food to cars, computing and clothing—a carefully regulated free market that harnesses the collective intelligence and aspirations of an entire nation, but that might start with the presumption that all land is developable, but is subject to strict principle-based rules and regulations that will protect the legitimate interests of existing communities. Such a system could still have the flexibility to preserve land of outstanding natural beauty and open spaces of communal value. It can maintain the powers of local authorities to actively develop in their areas and all development would have to comply with clear rules and principles.

I have time to suggest just two. I hope that the first meets with the right reverend Prelate’s approval: it is the “love thy neighbour” principle. It simply insists that all new development does nothing to materially devalue neighbouring homes and businesses. The second, the “carry your weight” principle, requires all new development to leave infrastructure in the state in which it found it or better. Before 1947, such a free market system existed in broad terms; it delivered the architecture, streets, cities and towns that we love and cherish today. Our planning system does not need to be reformed; it needs to be replaced with better, as do so many of our buildings. Let us start afresh, put a bit more trust in each other, love the future as much as we love the past and return this nation to an age of great building of which we can be proud.